In the normal dynamics of government scandal and dysfunction, leaders identify a problem and work to address it, seeking to win media and public approval. But what’s going on in San Francisco reflects the normal dynamics of law-enforcement scandals. Police officers who feel underappreciated — even besieged since the Black Lives Matter movement began in 2014 — push back hard at the idea that they’re doing something fundamentally wrong, even when it comes to police killings of unarmed people.

The San Francisco Police Officers Association denounced Mayor Ed Lee’s decision to ask Suhr to quit. “His retirement under pressure is an extreme loss to the department and the city,” a union statement said. “Chief Suhr, at the core, was and always will be a cop’s cop and dedicated to the men and women who don the uniform every day to serve and protect.”

This attitude doesn’t bode well for interim Police Chief Toney Chaplin, who told reporters that his agenda was “reform, reform, reform” because “the department has to move forward.” 

But despite the praise for Suhr from the police union, the fatal May 18 shooting of the stolen-car suspect was one more example of his lack of control over his department. Suhr has long implored officers not to shoot into fleeing cars. The police union had also criticized his response to the text-message scandal, including his demanding that officers sign a pledge essentially promising to not be bigots.

Union: “Protect due process” of accused officers

There are presently 18 police officers accused in the texting scandal. While police union president Martin Halloran condemned “the appalling racist behavior committed by a handful of officers,” he also said the police union would closely scrutinize the disciplinary process to ensure it “protects the due process rights of the officers.”

Those right are so strong that it is often difficult to fire a police officer in California unless he commits a crime or acts in egregious ways with indisputable evidence. It’s also difficult to even find out about officer misconduct, as the Los Angeles Times reported in April.

Nearly 40 years ago, California took its first steps to shield police misconduct from the public when Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law in his first term restricting details of officer personnel files from disclosure. A 2006 California Supreme Court decision went further and extended the law’s protections to cases in which civil service commissions weighed in on officer discipline. Today, almost all details about misconduct — including cases in which police officers were found to have used excessive force, engaged in racial profiling or lied on the job — are kept secret outside of court, administrative or civilian review board proceedings.

And although 23 states keep most public employee personnel records confidential, California is one of just three to provide specific protections for police information, according to a recent investigation by WNYC, a public radio station in New York.

Partly in response to the problems in his home town, Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, introduced SB 1286 that would open up police records in cases of “serious misconduct.” It passed an initial Senate committee vote last month, but then died without a second vote on Friday.

But as Conor Friedersdorf reported last August in The Atlantic, many police reform efforts have been launched in the Golden State only to go nowhere.

What’s next in San Francisco?

Meanwhile, Mayor Lee is facing pressure from the most liberal members of the city’s Board of Supervisors to go after bad cops. Supervisor Jane Kim, a rising star in city politics, has been pushing for change for more than four years and now has more support than ever.

But the police union thinks that Lee has already done too much to address police controversies.

On May 26th Mayor Ed Lee made some very disturbing remarks to the San Francisco Chronicle. These comments were directed at the SFPD Sergeant who was forced to discharge his firearm in the Officer Involved Shooting last week. The Mayor’s remarks were prejudicial and irresponsible. The POA has always responded to misinformed politicians who make such inflammatory statements and the Mayor is no exception.

That’s from Friday post on the police union’s Facebook page.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Justice Department continues its investigation of the San Francisco Police Department, launched in February. It’s not clear when the federal probe will conclude. 

The biggest controversies hanging over the SFPD: the fatal shooting of an unthreatening burglary suspect that was caught on video in December, the fatal shooting of a homeless man in murkier circumstances in April, and two rounds of revelations about racist and anti-gay text messages sent by police officers.

Until a week ago, Suhr was in an odd middle ground. He was under fire from activists but also from his own officers, whose union depicts him as a coward who refuses to stick up for a police force that by and large acts professionally.

However, the local political establishment seemed generally in his corner, including some prominent commentators. Suhr was seen as a relative source of stability in a city rocked by an ongoing investigation of a massive corruption scandal that took down state Sen. Leland Yee, among others, and appears to be zeroing in on Mayor Lee.

Making officers promise not to be racists

Despite years of criticism from San Francisco’s progressive media, Suhr wins praise from some San Franciscans for seeming to have his heart in the right place. Agreeing with some of protesters’ complaints, he formally requested a U.S. Justice Department review of his department, which is now underway. Suhr also drew national headlines for his policy of having officers take an annual pledge not to be racist or intolerant.

Yet critics says the kindest possible assessment is that Suhr may be a good person, but he is in over his head in dealing with a department mired in the past — specifically the ugly culture of big-city 20th-century police departments. Some outsiders surveying the situation agree. 

“If you have a poorly managed department without standards of accountability, everybody sinks to the bottom,” Samuel Walker, a retired criminal justice professor from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, told the Associated Press.

But in Mayor Lee’s most direct comments on the matter earlier this month, he disagreed. “I just don’t believe that having a different chief automatically gains the kind of groundwork that we are already gaining with the reforms that we have,” Lee said at a news conference in which he announced new policies meant to lead to fewer police shootings.

Willie Brown backs chief

The San Francisco political heavyweight offering the loudest support for Suhr is Willie Brown, the African American former mayor and Assembly speaker. This is from his Saturday column in the San Francisco Chronicle:

I feel sorry for Police Chief Greg Suhr.

From the tone of the attacks against him, you’d think he was the guy who put 20-plus bullets into Mario Woods [the suspect shot in December]. That he was one of the guys sending out racist texts. That he personally ordered the stopping and frisking of every person of color in the city.

In truth, he’s one of the most progressive police chiefs the city has seen in decades.

But every time he makes a move to reform the SFPD’s culture, whether it be to improve racial sensitivity or come up with smarter use-of-force policies, he’s overshadowed by another story about some cop’s inappropriate behavior.

The 82-year-old California political legend also took a pointed shot at the protesters.

Supervisor Aaron Peskin suggested at a recent board meeting that they bring in me to broker a peace deal between Mayor Ed Lee’s administration and the Black Lives Matter people, as I did during the last labor stalemate at Muni.

Are you kidding? Muni drivers are rational geniuses compared with these protesters.

Suhr appears safe for now — unless there is another dubious fatal shooting or still more racist police text messages emerge. That could prove the last straw.

August Vollmer, police chief in Berkeley, California, from 1905 to 1932, advocated the hiring of college graduates and offered the first collegiate course in police science at the University of California. Vollmer is also famous for the development of the principles of modern police administration. Advocates of the concepts of administrative efficiency sought to “centralize the authority within police departments” and to “rationalize the procedures of command control.”

But now, the hottest police reform proposal in years — mandating that patrol officers wear cameras in response to concerns about police brutality — is being stalled in Northern California’s largest city. The Mercury-News has details:

SAN JOSE — Amid a national push for police officers to wear body cameras, San Jose’s efforts to equip its officers have stalled for years, most recently waiting for the city and its police union to agree on a policy covering the use of cameras. …

As of Friday, department and union officials say there is no clear timetable for when the first San Jose officers will be equipped with the tiny cameras. In 2013, the Santa Clara County Police Chiefs Association agreed on a use policy for body-worn cameras. But union leaders say the array of privacy issues posed by the devices means their deployment has to pair with the creation of a more comprehensive policy that protects officers’ rights by limiting who can access the footage. …

The next union-city meeting on the issue is set for Jan. 5. Even if an agreement was reached then and there, it could still be years before the cameras hit the streets. …

“There’s this race to get body cams on police as soon as possible, but it’s a very complex issue,” said Officer James Gonzales, incoming vice president of the San Jose Police Officers’ Association. “We realize these are law-enforcement tools of the future. Our goal is to make sure our process is thoughtful.”

‘Indict-o-cams’? Or police protection?

The idea that patrol officers’ conduct while on the job is protected by privacy rights is kind of a head-scratcher when it comes to their interactions with the public in general, not just with criminal suspects. The ACLU has made the obvious point that giving police broad discretion as to when to have their cameras on means that bad cops will just turn them off before doing bad things. This New York Daily News article cites worries about officers having to film themselves while using bathrooms. That seems like a pretty weak argument.

But the NYDN piece also makes a good point about why police officers are likely to eventually come around. The cameras don’t just capture their bad behavior. Cameras can protect them if they behave properly but witness testimony and physical evidence suggest otherwise:

Equipping police with cameras isn’t a new concept. For decades police have used cameras mounted to the dashboards of their patrol cars — initially referred to with suspicion by officers as “indict-o-cams” until they discovered the footage exonerated them in most cases.